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 Entertainment | Books | March 2007 
The Uncomfortable Dead
 BYLINE
| The Uncomfortable Dead
By Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos, translated by Carlos Lopez
New York: Akashic Books
ISBN 978-1-933354-07-1, 268 pp, $15.95 |
Paco Ignacio Taibo's aptly titled novel "No Happy Ending" closes with the hero, Mexico City private eye Hector Belascoaran Shayne, a shotgun blast having "caught him in mid-torso and lifted his torn, broken body into the air," lying, dying, in the rain. His attackers flee unpunished.
This lack of a happy ending is typical of the novels Taibo has written chronicling Hector's investigations, and in their realistic pessimism they owe more to Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels than they do to those tomes in which superheroes disguised as private eyes vanquish all evil. The Belascoaran Shayne novels are also happily out of the mainstream in another way. The thugs and thieves, bandits and bad guys who are the immediate agents of evil - the villain who kicks Hector twice in the face as he lies dying, for example - are not its source. They are merely hired hands in the pay of the plutocrats and politicians safely ensconced many stories above the streets in which Hector fights the good fight against their minions.
That Taibo's understanding of evil looks more to systems than to individuals no doubt owes to his leftist analysis of society. Also, that Taibo is, in addition to being among the best-selling crime writers in the Spanish-speaking world, an intellectual and an activist makes it slightly less startling to find him collaborating on the latest Belascoaran Shayne novel, "The Uncomfortable Dead," with a real-life revolutionary, Subcomandante Marcos, official spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a leftist group based in the state of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. The project began with a letter to Taibo from Marcos, who suggested a jointly written novel, much of which was originally serialized in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada.
As this unlikely collaboration has all the earmarks of a stunt, one would be forgiven for imagining that it is nothing more than that, but in fact the odd-numbered chapters, written by Marcos, are as compelling as the even-numbered ones, produced by Taibo. Together the work of the two authors coheres to give us a novel richer in humor, acute observation, suspense and political wisdom than all but a few of the paperbacks cluttering up the mystery section of your local bookstore.
Those who've followed Hector's career will know that in the characteristics Taibo his given him - his love of Mexico City, "the most marvelously absurd city in the world," Coca-Cola sipped from vintage bottles, Mahler and the sidekicks who share his office - Taibo has created a shamus as endearing as any in the business, and will be relieved to see that, like Sherlock Holmes before him, he has survived his apparent death. Who would have thought, however, that Marcos, in the midst of his revolutionary duties, would be able, in Elias Contreras, to create a character as engaging as Taibo's sleuth?
Elias is a Zapatista country boy sent by Marcos into the "Monster," the Zapatista term for Mexico's capital. When he arrives there, we see that, in his naivete, but also in his creative use of language and his shrewdness, he is a descendant of Huckleberry Finn. One of his assignments while in the Monster is to meet with Hector to see if the detective might help the Zapatistas thwart a scheme to privatize a piece of the jungle in which they live. The detective is more than willing, not only because he shares the Zapatistas' opposition to the many scourges of the Mexican poor, but also because a man named Morales is implicated in the plot to profit from the Chiapas jungle.
Hector has also come across an unsavory Morales while attempting to get to the bottom of a series of phone calls ostensibly from an activist murdered more than 30 years before. In a novel like this one, such a repetition of names is seldom only a coincidence, and in this respect "The Uncomfortable Dead" is true to form, but it is not simply that the same Morales was engaged in murder in the '70s and shady land deals a few decades later. Rather - without giving too much away - we soon see that there are multiple Moraleses. Indeed, it seems to be Marcos and Taibo's point - a position familiar both to connoisseurs of noir and to those who view society through a leftist lens - that there are armies of Moraleses in the pay of the puppet masters.
Marcos, writing in the voice of the character who bears his name, reminds us: "The murderer is the scene of the crime. The murderer is the system. ... When there's a crime, you have to go looking for the culprit upstairs, not downstairs. The Evil is the system, and the Bad are those that serve the system."
Hector confronts one of the Moraleses in the book's final chapter. He is, the detective finds, nothing but "a poor slob, a minor scumbag"; the detective deals with this pathetic example of the Bad in a manner that must be called poetic. The Evil, however, remains. Readers will hope that Hector and Elias will return to face it another day. |
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